Part of the Treaty Oak in Austin

The landscape in that part of Texas is beautiful, miles and miles of gnarly, picturesque oaks being the dominant feature. Escarpment live oaks are small versions of their coastal cousins, and while most don't get very large, most do get alot of character. As do the post oaks and bur oaks that dominate the hill country. Post oaks seem to be the most common tree in that part of Texas, but it's hard to say. 

 
Typical bur oak in Texas hill country

Bur oaks are more scattered; it is so strange to me to see the trees I remember as a child- usually huge, spreading and massive- being so stunted and gnarly beyond belief. Cedar elms are another great tree around there, with chunky textured bark, super gnarl, and tiny twigs and leaves. That's the only area I've ever been where they are common, although they do extend up through Arkansas to the southern corner of Tennessee. Ashe juniper dominates the understory, in some places to a fault, due to it's allelopathy. Along the creeks and rivers of the hill country you might more commonly see cottonwoods, baldcypress, pecan, sycamore, and the Texas persimmon, a really cool little tree reminiscent of crape myrtle, with white bark and usually multi-stemmed form. I also saw black cherry and hophornbeam, both (I guess) a little south of the middle of their ridiculously huge north-south ranges. I love seeing trees in bony dry Texas I've seen in jolly green New England. I can't wait to hit the mountains of Mexico or Honduras someday to see them. I also got to see osage-orange in it's native range, and the beautiful mesquite tree.

A panorama of Pedernales Falls State Park near Austin

On our way back from Texas, I talked my wife into a brief (3 hour tour) stop at Meeman-Shelby Forest State Park. It is a 13,467 acre park on the East Bank of the Mississippi River North of Memphis. Most of the park is designated a "State Natural Area". From the SNA website:

"Meeman-Shelby Forest State Natural Area is one of the largest contiguous tracts of mature bottomland hardwood forest and Chickasaw Bluff forest left in Tennessee. The natural area includes approximately 7,000 acres of Mississippi Alluvial Plain and approximately 4,000 acres of Chickasaw Bluff.  The bottomlands undulate from cypress dominated sloughs and bayous to bottomland hardwood with a few feet of topographic relief. Cypress sloughs are dominated by bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) and southern hackberry (Celtis laevigata) with an understory of black willow (Salix nigra), green ash (Fraxinus pennsylvania), and water elm (Planera aquatica). Bottomland hardwoods are dominated by cottonwoods (Populus deltoids), sycamore (Platanus occidentalis), and southern hackberry. East of the vast bottomlands, the Third Chickasaw Bluff rises abruptly from the floodplain. The bluff vegetation is variable according to slope aspect but is characterized by sweet gum (Liquidambar styraciflua), tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera), white and red oaks (Quercus sp.), and beech (Fagus grandifolia) with a distinctive understory of red buckeye (Aesculus pavia).

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A cedar elm in Meeman-Shelby - photo by Michael Davie

The Park is notable for containing 11 state champion as well as 3 national champion trees, as well as the above mentioned elements. I'm sorry to say that I did not get to see any of the champion trees, though I think I drove past the national cedar elm, which is right by a road. And I really did not have the opportunity to measure any trees, so only got a vague idea of what the park contains. We took a three-or-so-mile hike along a trail whose name I'm not quite sure of. I thought it was the "Woodland Trail" but the trail maps from the visitor center were so terrible I'm not quite sure, it seemed about the three miles that trail is supposed to be.
The topography had much more relief than I had expected, at least for part of the park. The Chickasaw Bluff is apparently a fault escarpment, and while I did not see the steepest part, looking at the topo map the elevation drops about 200 feet in the distance of 300 feet. There are numerous ravines from the upland edge of the park cutting through and dropping down to the floodplain, which is the larger part of the park, but has no trails. The trail we took followed one of these coves down, though we turned around basically as soon as we hit the bottom. I only measured one tree accurately, because we were pressed for time and my wife has little patience for stopping every few hundred feet and standing around while I'm fiddling with measurements. It was a sassafras, about 4 feet in circumference and 119.2 feet tall. I did pause to shoot around with the laser and found that most of the canopy dominants consistently reached into the 120 class, with a couple that I shot approaching 130, mostly sycamore and tuliptree. 

The forest that I saw looked mostly uniform in height and age, though there were a few sheltered coves I drove by that looked as though they might contain some taller individuals. I had guessed the ages of most areas on the ridges to be 80 to 100 years, with a few areas looking possibly a little older, but I recieved an email from the ranger saying most of the park is only about 70 years old, with an area of old swamp forest in the southern part of the floodplain). Of course, it is a big park and I saw very little. It warrants another ENTS visit, certainly. The growth rates are fantastic in there and the diversity is amazing. For example, I saw willow, water, Shumard, bur, white, post, southern red, cherrybark, and black oaks. I think I saw northern red and swamp chestnut, and there are supposed to be Nuttall oaks, blackjack, shingle, and chinkapin oaks in that county, but I'm not sure about in the park. I won't even go into the hickories, mostly because I'm not even sure which ones I saw there. There are big stands of forest grown sugarberry, not huge, but it was very nice to see stands like that. I saw American, cedar, and winged elms. It was great to see large, forest-grown cedar elms, I'd never seen them like that before. I wish I'd taken more comparison photos. I also saw some fairly large forest grown bur oaks in the floodplain, which I had not seen before. Of course, I saw hophornbeam. Loads of persimmon, walnut, beech, sassafras, honey locust (water locust?), really too much to list.

I recommend the visit to anyone who lives or travels nearby. I can't wait to go again, and I'll be sure to have more time and be able to get better information